


in the name of justice

by sibley (ferns)



Category: Justice Society of America (Comics)
Genre: Dubious Morality, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Multi, emphasis on the "dubious", lavender marriage, some literal cosmic justice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 14:26:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29577477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: Johnny Sorrow crosses a line.Tigress and Icicle are happy to make him regret it.
Relationships: Artemis Crock & Cameron Mahkent, Cameron Mahkent/Rick Tyler (background), Jesse Chambers/Artemis Crock (background)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	in the name of justice

**Author's Note:**

> This was really some well-needed catharsis.
> 
> [ **CW:** this fic contains references to sexual assault of a teenager by an adult, implications of other past CSA/sexual assault, somewhat graphic depictions of violence that I tagged for just in case, body horror, murder/death, references to child harm/attempted child murder, and one very brief usage of text that may cause eye strain.]

Cameron’s just paying for the pizza he’s bringing back home when he gets the call from Rick.

He answers it on the walk to his car, balancing the box on his hand. The pizza place is local, and they’ve gotten used to his look by now. Most places wouldn’t dare serve a supervillain. This one has cashiers who ask how his life partner is doing. “Hey, dude. This a social call, or are you gonna tell me I’m under arrest?”

 _“Cam, this is serious.”_ Rick’s always got that kind of gravely voice thing going on, but there’s something harder in his tone that makes Cameron stiffen. _“Have you worked with Johnny Sorrow recently?”_

Cameron puts his pizza down in the passenger seat and gets into the car. “Not for awhile. Seen him around, though, at some of the big secret meetings I can’t tell you about.”

 _“Does he know about Isabelle?”_ Cameron can practically see Rick pacing. He’s going to break his phone at this rate. Even without super-strength, the guy’s good at wrecking appliances unintentionally.

“Don’t think so. Most of the big guys have noticed T being gone, but she’s been getting back to work lately, and the only ones who know about the whole situation are the ones we trust to be babysitters.” Remembering the… _fraught_ history between Rick and Bill, Cameron decides not to say that he’s one of the people they’ve trusted to keep an eye on the baby when both her parents are working. “He’s not one of them, and they know to keep everything on the down-low.”

 _“Okay. Okay, that’s good. Don’t let him find out, okay?”_ Rick’s definitely pacing. Now he lowers his voice down to a whisper. _“Look. The JSA doesn’t know I’m telling you this._ Nobody _knows I’m telling you this. But Sorrow crossed a line, and I wanted to make sure you and Artemis and Izzy were okay.”_

“What kind of line?” There’s a bad feeling creeping in the pit of Cameron’s stomach and warming his blood to the point of discomfort. He and Rick don’t see eye to eye on everything. That’s kind of to be expected in their lines of work. But the arrangement he and Artemis have with him and Jesse never could’ve worked out the way it has if they didn’t share _some_ of the same morals.

When Rick tells him point-blank what happened, spiderwebs of frost creep across the windows and windshield, icicles crackling over the rear-view mirror and snow collecting on top of the pizza box as Cameron’s eyes narrow into slits.

Oh. Yeah. That’s a bridge too far.

* * *

Artemis’ first words when Cameron gets to the apartment they’ve made their own are “What happened?” 

“The pizza’s salvageable,” he says as an answer, putting the box down on the table. “Said hi to Samantha at the register for you. I’m going to go kill Johnny Sorrow. You know how it goes.”

Artemis tilts her head like a cat watching its prey. Isabelle’s sucking on her thumb, curled close against Artemis’ chest. Her breath comes in tiny puffs of condensation, and Cameron realizes he’s accidentally sucked all the heat out of the place. Artemis raises an eyebrow. “What did Sorrow do to you out there? Had to be something big.”

“Not to me.” Cameron scowls and _tries_ to reign in the cold. “Rick called—Jesse’s fine,” he says hastily when he sees the glint in Artemis’ eyes go from curiously dangerous to downright murderous. “She’s fine and the baby’s fine. Nothing happened to them, either. It was one of the junior JSA. He wouldn’t say which. For privacy.”

Artemis’ hand slowly drifts toward her thigh, where one of her reserve knives would usually be strapped. “Dead?”

Cameron shakes his head. He glances at Isabelle where she’s peacefully sleeping despite the near-freezing temperature. “They’re alive, just in rough shape. He said… he called to ask if Sorrow knew about Isabelle. He thought she might be in danger.” _You, too,_ he wants to add, but saying that will only piss her off further. “He wanted to make sure our girl was safe.”

 _Our girl._ Even with anger making him flush, there’s still an odd sense of joy that comes from saying it. He has a daughter. They have a daughter. The arrangement between him and Artemis isn’t the one people really expect it to be. They love each other very much, Cameron’s not sure if he’d be able to survive with out her—even though Artemis would _definitely_ be fine without him—but they’re not… like that. 

Isabelle came from them both, there’s no two ways around that, and he’s her father as much as Artemis is her mother. They have the kind of love that makes you settle down with someone and have a kid with them. It’s also the kind of love that means Cameron can bring his boyfriends over (boyfriend singular, now) and Artemis would have her girlfriend come by if she trusted her with the location of their latest hideout knowing it was halfway across the world and Jesse was five months pregnant and trying not to use her powers because of it.

If Artemis looked murderous before, she now appears practically bloodthirsty. Clearly she can read between the lines and pick up on what happened. Which is good. Because he doesn’t want to say it out loud. “You said he wouldn’t tell you which one?”

“Yeah, he told me the family had been handling it internally. Happened months ago, he said, but they finally told the rest of the team. He slipped up, so I know it was one of the girls, not the kid with the genie, but I dunno which.” Cameron takes Isabelle from Artemis and brushes her thin hair with his fingers. She’s so small. How something as fucked up as his genes could make something as good as her is _insane._ Then again, it’s probably all Artemis. Minus the blossoming frost powers and the shock of white going through her dark hair. “It’s not a pattern, far as he can tell. It was just the once.”

“Once is enough,” Artemis says, voice hard. “Do you really think we could kill him?”

 _We._ Of course it’s _we._ That’s what being life partners in crime is all about. Acting in sync with each other. Regardless of whether or not one of them was still technically supposed to be taking it easy after giving birth.

“I don’t know,” Cameron admits. “He’s pretty powerful. But I think he’s gotten weaker since crash-landing back in this dimension with his new face, and he’s already died before. Maybe we could make it stick. I figure we could hook up a magical tripwire and take care of him that way. The heroes might even take out the trash for us.”

Artemis fidgets with the place on her belt where another knife would be, if Isabelle hadn’t been starting to get into her grabby phase where she wanted to pull on everything she saw from her daddy’s hair to Bill’s mustache to her mama’s best crossbow bolts. Cameron knows her well enough to be certain she wants to carve a plan into the table. Set it in stone, or at least in oak. It’s a habit she picked up from her own mom, according to her.

“I might have an idea,” she muses. “But we’re gonna need Bill. And Hourman has to pull some strings.” Okay, _that_ is new. Usually she doesn’t call Rick by his alias. Or by name. She just says _your boyfriend_ or, more recently, _your boy toy._ She’s really…

It’s not that Cameron doesn’t take this seriously. He knows it’s serious. He’s the one who told her in the first place and suggested the idea of killing Sorrow. He’s tried to kill those JSA kids in battle before. That’s not a big deal, just like it’s not a big deal to try to kill any of the big leagues. He’s not losing any sleep over the idea of icing Stargirl, Cyclone, or Kid Thunderbolt (or whatever the hell pen-kid’s name is). 

But that’s _different._ He and Tigress don’t have nearly as much of a moral code as some villains do—Jesus, ever try carrying on a conversation with the Shade? Maybe it was a good thing they’d pretty much completely fallen out of touch with him, out of all the people they’d pulled that decades-old Calgary job with—but like Rick said, Sorrow crossed the line.

Killing a superhero kid in battle is one thing. Even killing a kid civilian isn’t the worst thing in the world, though he has to say he’s gotten a little warier of it since Isabelle being born. Feeling up a superhero kid is another. No matter if it’s only happened once. Like Artemis said, once is enough.

So yeah, he’s taking it seriously. He wants Sorrow put away for good. He brings a lot of liability with him, too, considering his tendency to double-cross people and refuse to pay them and summon them to do jobs while knowing full well the world is probably going to end because of it—

All his thoughts about how personally Artemis is taking it compared to him fall away. “Oh, shit. I know when he did it.”

Artemis has obviously reached the same conclusions about that job. It was certainly a bit longer than months ago, when Rick said it happened. But it had to be then. Based off when Sorrow left, died, then crawled back into their world with his tail between his legs looking like he’d passed through the digestive systems of several animals no longer extant on their world, there’s only a few times it _could_ have happened. Especially since Sorrow’s been taking such a long hiatus to lick his wounds.

“Yeah. We know _who_ it was, too,” Artemis says. She stands up. Pulls a knife from nowhere. “Call Bill. Tell him to come over. I want his opinion on this.”

There’s a mutual understanding that passes between them when they make eye contact. They don’t have a particular fondness for any member of the superheroing community, and especially not for the bratty little ones. Gun to his head, if he had to choose a favorite superheroic minor, he’d probably pick whatever the hell that red arrow girl on Young Justice had going on before she dropped off the map, just because she kinda-sorta reminds him of Artemis. Not any of the JSA’s cub scouts. But goddamn. Knowing exactly what part they had to play in that whole fucked-up event? _That_ makes it personal.

“I’ll call Bill,” Cameron says. He kisses Isabelle on the forehead. “And I’ll put her to bed so she can properly nap before he gets here. Are you gonna be okay?”

“I’m not made of glass,” Artemis growls. She stomps to the doorway of the kitchenette before stopping to look over her shoulder. “I’m going to call Jesse and talk to her. She’ll… she might know what to do.” 

In his head, Cameron concedes that she usually does, as much as the two of them tend to immediately drive the other into a homicidal rage. Jesse’s whip-smart and she’ll already know about the situation from the kid herself, or her family, or whoever it was that told the rest of their little outfit about what went down. Calling her is the smart thing to do.

Now he just needs to find where he put that damn Enochian-engraved coin Bill gave him in case of emergencies. Getting the band back together indeed, he thinks, a little rueful. Not that there’s much left of them to reach out to. But, well… they’re certainly gonna need all the help they can get.

* * *

“Where’s my favorite girl?” In an over-dramatic swoop of cape, Bill scoops Isabelle up and kisses her cheek. She tries to tear his mustache off like always and he winces but doesn’t put her down. “Getting into all kinds of trouble, are you?”

“Almost as much as her mama,” Cameron jokes. It falls a little flat. They do this little back-and-forth ritual every time he comes over to see his granddaughter. His heart’s just not in it this time around. “Thanks for coming on such short notice.”

Bill nods, cradling Isabelle close while she coos and babbles in baby talk to him, obviously feeling refreshed after her nap. “Of course. You said it was important.”

“It is,” Artemis says stiffly.

Cameron turns. He hasn’t seen her fully-armored since Isabelle was born; usually she just wears the belt so she’ll have her toolkit and something that keeps her more low-profile. Benefit to being a C-lister was that the good guys never noticed when you dropped off the map—unfortunately, they usually did when you popped back up again. Now, though, she’s all dressed up like this is still the days when they’d just started working together again.

“We’re going to kill Johnny Sorrow,” she says. “And we need your help.”

Bill purses his lips. “You’re going to _what?”_

“Kill Johnny Sorrow,” Cameron repeats for her. “Can’t be too hard. Someone already did it once. We can put him on ice permanently.”

Bill grimaces at the pun. “Why?”

“Heard through the grapevine that he’d stepped out of line,” Artemis says coolly. Bill doesn’t know about their _arrangement_ with a certain superhero couple, again because of the testy (to put it very mildly) relationship between him and Rick, and they’re going to keep it that way for as long as they can. “We’re supervillains, aren’t we? Do we need a big reason to cut that faceless bastard’s invisible head off? You’ve killed people for less.”

Bill can clearly tell there’s something they aren't telling him. He’s not exactly the most upstanding person around (another thing being put very mildly) but he’s still got that old gentleman-villain flair. Nothing against putting most damsels in distress, it’s all part of the job, but certainly somewhat against his pseudo-daughter-in-law being one of the damsels. “Did he hurt you?”

“No,” Artemis says, voice clipped. She taps a crossbow quarrel against her palm. “He put his hands on one of the kiddie JSA members.”

“Where’s the harm in that? We three try to kill them and their babysitters all the time.” It’s hard to take Bill seriously with such a giggly baby in his arms. Isabelle smacks him in the chest with her tiny chubby fists.

“Yeah,” Cameron says tightly, “and if I ever tried to get handsy with one of them I’d sure hope someone would take me out permanently right then and there.”

“...Ah,” Bill says, with the air of someone who just discovered some rotten food in their fridge. “That.”

Cameron feels Artemis’ tension from across the room just as well as he can feel the swell of spring heat coming through the open window. She’s damn near radiating with it. The temperature in the room lowers until they can see Bill’s breath. 

“That sounds like you knew about it,” Artemis says dangerously, voice low. The tapping of her quarrel increases. “You know, _William,_ I would think very carefully about whatever it is you’re about to say while you’re holding our daughter.”

Cameron knows in a straight fight the two of them probably can’t take him. And he doesn’t want to hurt—kill—Bill. He’s his… he’s his father in the ways that matter. He doesn’t want to hurt him. But he’s holding Isabelle. Which means he and Artemis won’t hold back, if it comes down to it. And they _will_ win, because the little girl in his arms needs them to. 

“All I know is what Sorrow told me,” Bill sighs. “It was in passing, while he was raving about getting his face back, as he does. He said he needed… the love of an innocent, or something to that effect. You know the ancient occult stories about sacrificing virgins. It sounded like that. I assumed he’d find some teenager and off them. I didn’t think about it.” He half shrugs. “So now you’re saying he r—”

“My source told me he kissed her,” Cameron interrupts, realizing too late he just made the same mistake Rick did and now Bill knows it was one of the girls. Ice creaks beneath Bill’s feet when he shifts his weight and opens his mouth to say something. “If you say that’s not the same—I know. I know it isn’t. But do you feel the ice crystals in your windpipe, there? ‘Cause they’re gonna get a whole lot sharper if you try to tell us not to take care of some scarlet pedophile running around in _our neighborhood_ just because he hasn’t gone further than forcing a kiss on a kid who probably doesn’t even know how to drive yet.”

Isabelle seems to pick up on the fact that the energy in the room has very strongly shifted, and Bill allows Cameron to step forward and take his daughter back. She buries her face in the front of his sweatshirt. In turn, Artemis buries the quarrel she’d been fidgeting with in Bill’s sleeve, impaling it to the wall behind him. She didn’t need to fire it. She just threw it. 

“Are you going to help or not?” She asks, waiting for him to pull the quarrel out of the drywall. “Because I have some bolts in my quiver that haven’t tasted real blood in awhile.” 

“How do you want me to help?” It’s not a refusal, which is as good as a yes. Though he might still back out when he hears who they’re going to try to get the attention of. Certain powerful figures associated with the Justice Society don’t tend to discriminate when they get a taste of blood in the water.

It’s all about stealth, until it’s time to turn on the glowing neon signs.

“First,” Artemis says, venom still audible in her voice, “tell us what you know about the Spectre.”

* * *

“I feel like Batman,” Cameron says, perched on top of a gargoyle. It’s raining, droplets turning to hail that bounces off when it comes in contact with his skin, the drips sliding down his nose freezing into tiny icicles. “You know what this reminds me of, T? Our first date.”

“I thought our first date was icing those Infinitors, not getting soaked to the bone on a stakeout,” Artemis tries to joke. The ledge of ice jutting out over her head that Cameron formed to keep her mostly dry muffles her voice somewhat, but he can still hear that her voice is a little too flat. And she didn’t make any jabs about how they’d both screwed up and picked the gayest person possible to go out with back when they still thought they were straight-edge.

“Not up for jokes tonight?” He says, abandoning the gargoyle to step down and under the shelter with her. She narrows her eyes and he puts his hand on her shoulder. “Artemis. You okay?”

She sets her mouth in a line. “I will be.”

“Hey, you know there’s nobody I’d rather have by my side for a job than you,” he tells her quietly. It’s the cold, honest truth. They’re _partners._ Even swore an oath on it. For better or worse, until death do they part, and all that bullshit. Maybe they didn’t need to do the whole nine yards to make sure Isabelle’s birth certificate had both of their names on it, but wedding celebration heists were fun. Plus he got to hook up with Catman during the honeymoon.

(It’s a little easier to think about the good memories he has with Artemis over the reasons why she’s feeling so freaked out. They share a lot with each other, they really do, but it’s always harder to talk about the rough stuff. Like how much it hurt that a lifetime of his dad—biological only, it’s Bill in the ways that _count—_ telling him he wasn’t good for anything because he’d killed the only good thing he had was somehow small fry in the eyes of the universe that let him die “redeemed” like some kind of _superhero…_ or especially about the years Artemis spent fending for herself when her parents were constantly alternating between breaking out of prison and being locked up.)

“Sure, Snowcone. Just be ready to run in case the Spectre gets greedy,” she says, and he kisses her cheek even though she wrinkles her nose at the feeling of an ice cube pressed against her skin. This would be so much weirder and worse if one of them had needed to stay behind with Isabelle. It was lucky they’d managed to find Becky’s old number, and even luckier it was the one she still used. Now _there_ was a turncoat villain they could count on to keep their daughter safe.

“Well, maybe you’ll have to carry me, I’m not as fast as—” He pauses. “There.”

Artemis must’ve seen Sorrow a few seconds prior through her scope, he realizes. His eyes aren’t nearly as good as hers. It’s that Brooks family magic. The same kind that lets her take a six-pack of punches from Wildcat and still be up and swinging when Cameron himself would’ve been down for the count five-point-five punches ago.

God, he loves her.

He doesn’t even see her move by the time the two men with him are down. It really is just like their first date when they jump down to confront him. Not hand-in-hand, because that’s a liability when one of them is a physical fighter who kind of relies on having both of her hands free, but close enough.

Sorrow, facing them, looks… uh…

It’s impossible to focus on him. Cameron’s pretty sure his hair is blonde? No, brown. No, definitely blond. His nose is crooked, then straight, then squashed, and his eyes and mouth vibrate in place like motors. Before when Cameron saw him after he got back from his stupid “subtle realm” nightmare dimension field trip, or whatever, it was out of the corner of his eye. Him having a face again after getting almost every shred of power ripped out of him was just an interesting factoid that got passed around as gossip in swinger bars. 

Now, a part of Cameron isn’t convinced _this_ isn’t just as much a mask as his previous gimp outfit. Like he’s still capable of killing them just by giving them a peek.

“Hey, fucker,” Cameron says, crystals spilling from his mouth a little more than he means them to. Powder snow packed with shards of ice as strong as permafrost seals over Sorrow’s face before he can launch into one of those pretentious rants. It’s like he thinks he has the pull of the Shade when he’s barely even a Mr. Somebody. “Do us all a favor and sit _real_ still.”

The glowing arrow that impales itself on the pavement in front of him shatters only a second after it touches asphalt, the red runes painting a ring around Sorrow’s feet. No chance to defend himself. No chance to do anything but stand there. _Superheroes_ take chances. _They_ don’t.

“You remember us, right?” Artemis says. No, not Artemis, not really. She’s all Tigress now. Fangs bared. Sorrow’s eyes flicker to her. Or at least Cameron thinks they do. It’s kind of hard to tell with his face shifting like that. “Looks like you do. Maybe I should ask if you remember tricking us and trying to turn us into your little lackeys.”

The runes spread out seemingly on their own, Bill’s quiet orchestration from the shadows as subdued as he can possibly get. They map out constellations in a circular web around Sorrow’s feet. Cameron winks at him. Damn, he really _is_ a lightweight now that he’s back in this dimension. The _old_ Johnny Sorrow would’ve killed them all by now, or at least made an attempt. The only thing _this_ Sorrow is doing is widening his weird eyes at them and trying to smile.

“Say, did you hear what happened to Arthur Light, once the Spectre caught up with him?” Cameron says, conversational. Ice shackles force Sorrow to his knees. Damn. Idiot shouldn’t have even tried coming back in the first place if this is how he’s gonna act. It’s a disgrace to the things he once accomplished and a disgrace to the title of supervillain, period. “Total bloodbath. Guy got turned into a candle and burnt alive. I can’t even imagine how much that hurt. Can you, T?”

The ice around Sorrow’s mouth cracks away. Goody, his voice is still as fucking annoying as it ever was. It’s like he’s speaking in italics or something. _“There̶ ͝w̸il͏l b̴e—”_

“Shut up, will you?” Cameron sighs, and Sorrow’s whole body lights up like a self-contained fireworks show. “Maybe he won’t see you if you stay really quiet. Or maybe he will. I’d love to find out.”

The earth is shaking now. Cameron and Artemis aren’t exactly the Spectre’s biggest fans. They’ve had to outrun his judgement on more than one occasion (well, they’ve had to run while he punished someone else—both of them know that if he, or it, or them, or whatever the fuck you’re supposed to call a thing like that, really wanted their pound of flesh, there’d be no escaping it) and it’s enough to make anybody shit their pants with terror. But the rumbling is still welcome. 

It feels almost like being in the water with a shark. Like the hair standing up on the back of your neck when somebody is watching you. Like being at the bottom of the food chain for the first time—living your life as if you were the apex predator before suddenly realizing all those carnivorous megafauna weren’t as extinct as you’d been led to believe.

Bill had said it would take a few minutes for the Spectre to take notice of the biggest, flashiest, most _guilty_ thing in the world, even if he wasn’t already busy tearing some other poor criminal to shreds for their sins. Now that seems like he was underestimating just how appetizing they’ve made Sorrow look in the eyes of God’s wrath.

(Cameron doesn’t believe in gods or a God or anything like that. Neither does Artemis. But they damn sure believe in the Spectre.)

“Ooh, I almost forgot,” Cameron says, as a trio of bolts sink shallowly into Sorrow’s chest and give him the mother of all electric shocks, partially as some extra insurance and partially just because Artemis wanted to. “Isn’t the Spectre on Justice Society sometimes?”

“Mhm,” Artemis says, slinging her arm around his neck. She hasn’t smiled like this in a long time. “Maybe he’d take anything happening to one of his teammates a bit more personally. Guess we’re going to find out.”

Cameron’s ears pop like there’s just been a sudden pressure change, and Artemis yanks him out of the way as something barrels past him in a blur of red. He barely catches her whispered “hang on” before she’s damn near throwing him back up to their previous perch. He gets the hint and gives himself a boost with some icicles that jut out of the building and scrambles under his now-melting shelf as Artemis reverse-rappels up the wall to get up there with him.

Bill should be safe wherever he is, too. Cameron hopes he’s got a view of the lightshow. But—hey, since when does the Spectre wear red? And does he usually have guns? Cameron’s pretty sure he’s never seen the guy with guns before. Well, one time he heard a story about him turning a murderer _into_ a gun, but… that’s different, right?

“You know,” Artemis says thoughtfully, looking at the crimson blur of bullets, “I don’t think that’s the Spectre.”

“Yeah,” Cameron agrees, and points to the wall of green suddenly rising ominously out of the ground. Sorrow’s free of the circle now, trying to run with a bullet in his leg. The circle is only meant to show the Spectre—and apparently this other person who Cameron finds it weirdly difficult to focus his eyes on, but he's _pretty sure_ looks a lot like that lady who killed the Ultra-Humanite, at least in terms of outfit—where to punch, not keep him truly trapped inside. “But that is.”

Seeing the Spectre makes him feel like he’s looking at the stars for the first time and realizing exactly how insignificant he is in the grand scheme of the universe. It feels like the crises, when the whole world held its breath and there weren’t any dividing lines between heroes and villains because they didn’t _need_ any because most of the crooks sure as hell cared about their home getting destroyed. Seeing the Spectre is like being… like being the ancestor of humanity again. Wide-eyed and still on four legs and surrounded by things that could snap them up.

“He’s always more naked than I remember,” Artemis murmurs, and Cameron nods as the red blur swoops closer to the Spectre’s face with a sound like a leather coat snapping in the breeze, buzzing like an angry hornet. “Holy shit, are they going to fight?”

There’s no supernatural turf war in store for them today, however, as after a moment of sizing each other up, the person (spirit?) in red streaks away from the much bigger Spectre, glowing like a dying star, and the Spectre turns a pair of massive eyes that gleam like the pits of hell on where Sorrow lies on the pavement. 

He’s definitely speaking to him, with a voice so deep and loud it literally shakes the building they’re sheltering on, but it’s impossible to make out because it sounds like getting your eardrum stabbed. Sorrow’s honest-to-Christ cowering before him like the pussy he is. Whatever reason the Spectre has for manifesting tentacles to come out of his mouth, slithering closer to Sorrow with a sound like a thousand people sobbing, it’s clearly scaring the shit out of him. Good.

“Shoulda brought popcorn,” Cameron remarks. Artemis snorts.

“Burn, baby, burn,” she says, as the lights around Sorrow wink out. That’s Bill taking his leave, then. No need to keep alerting people who eat sins for breakfast or whatever the hell when they’ve already got the biggest fish in the sea right there. 

Sorrow doesn’t scream when he’s dragged into the Spectre’s mouth and ripped apart as golden-red blood splatters across the concrete and the sound of bones being crushed fills the air. It might’ve been more satisfying if he had. Then again, the blood reforming into a solid gold statue of a Johnny Sorrow contorted in agony and with his face slashed out of existence is still pretty sick, so they’ll take what they can get.

The Spectre ripples and creaks like like an old house—hell, he’s the size of one, so why not—as he licks his lips, Sorrow’s blood sizzling where it meets the pavement. Cameron feels for Artemis’ hand and she lets him squeeze it when the Spectre swivels his head around like an owl, clearly looking for any scraps that didn’t wind up going down his (it can’t be a _he,_ but if it wants to look like a giant mostly-naked man, then that’s probably what he wants to be called) throat. He definitely doesn’t eat people most of the time, but maybe Sorrow getting eaten was only symbolic, and now he’s being punished for all eternity in his stomach. Artemis certainly hopes so.

And then the Spectre is gone, like he’s just been blown away by the wind, leaving only the statue behind, and Cameron lets out his shaky breath.

“Y’know, if we start doing this with every scumbag who pulls a stunt like this, we’re gonna be hunting for a long time,” Artemis says, looking down at the statue through her scope. 

“Think we could get paid for it?” Cameron checks his nails, knowing that they’re both thinking the same thing—that a repeat performance of this sounds like it’d be pretty damn fun, especially if they got to actually do the dirty work next time around instead of relying on naked, green, and scary.

“Oh, I’m sure we could. We used to be hired muscle all the time.” She stands and stretches. “I needed a side gig, anyway. Maybe if we take a break, shooting at heroes will go back to being exciting.”

“Speak for yourself. I think it’s _very_ exciting to shoot at Hourman.” Cameron clicks his tongue and Artemis whacks his shoulder.

“Gross. That doesn’t even make sense, Frostbite.” She’s certainly cheered up, though, smiling genuinely, deep brown eyes sparkling. “Take a picture of what’s left and send it to him. Bet the kid would like to see it. Might give her and her family some peace of mind.”

They haven’t said her name yet. Well, her alias. They don’t know her name. But even though they both know which kid it has to be, they still haven’t said it. It’s not… well. They did their part. They took out Sorrow. The Justice Society can decide whether or not it was supervillains taking care of a threat to their organization or genuine compassion from hearts of ice and teeth. Sorrow needed to be gotten rid of no matter what. It doesn’t need to be noble. 

They’ll still try to kill the kid if they come across her again. That’s just the business. Heroes always give as good as they get, anyway.

Cameron makes sure he gets the smoldering patches of pavement in the photo before he sends it off to Rick. He hopes it helps.

“We’ve got time before we told Becky we’d be back to take care of you know who,” he says. “Maybe we could—”

“I’m not buying you hot wings,” Artemis huffs. “We can get takeout on the way home.”

“Hahm’s Barbecue is on the way,” Cameron wheedles. “I can get hot wings there and you can get those short ribs you like.” The waiter there has a massive thing for Artemis and usually gives them a discount, something they exploit all the time to get cheap food after a rough gig. 

“...Fine, we’ll get barbecue. But you’re taking bottle duty when we get home,” she says, threatening, and Cameron grins, because yeah, this is it. This is them with a now-golden weight taken off their shoulders. Back to normal.

His phone screen lights up in his hand. Probably Rick. He sticks it in his pocket. There’ll be time to talk later. Right now he’s got a date with the girl of his dreams.

Johnny Sorrow is dead and it’s a good, good day for the two of them to be alive.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm @augustheart on tumblr and I love the Artemis n' Cam lavender marriage dynamic.


End file.
